Why I will not quit smoking (yet)

One of the good things about smoking is that you get a feel of the number of people who actually care for you. They come up with ideas to get you to quit smoking, some of which are outright pleas and others which are downright outrageous. But where ever on the dial they lie, they are indications of care and love. These attempts ensure that the thought about quitting tobacco stays in the front of your mind. You constantly debate with yourself about whether you should take the trouble to get rid of the habit.

A couple of days ago was one such moment. I thought to myself why I had not yet gotten around to quitting. Then it struck me that it was because the effort required to quit was just not worth it.

The commonest problem associated with smoking is that it causes death. But then isn’t life a unstoppable hurtle towards death anyways? At this point, someone points out that while life always leads to death, smoking would make this death painful.

Given the state of the world today, I am more likely to die of a terrorist act, a car accident, a plane crash than of smoking. Any of these can also leave me a vegetable awaiting a quick death to relieve me of the wait for a slow one.

Smoking, for whatever it is worth, affords me a pleasure. In exchange it does not, like alcohol, take away my ability to take proper decisions; now does it, like drugs, take away my sense of right and wrong. It is today as dangerous as walking into a 5-star hotel, taking a flight, or just plain crossing the road.

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And smoking is also good exercise. You have to walk one mile from your workstation right onto the street outside the office premises. Unless your office has a smoking room. In which case passive smoking will kill you!